Infections of the Sacred

On 15 March 1666, Louis XIV conducted his first military review.
Several years later, a medal was struck depicting the scene
(Foucault 1979a: 188). In the spatial layout of this medallion,
which showed lines of disciplined soldiers sharing equal space with
their sovereign (see fig. 1, above), Michel Foucault would
find the first and quite tentative sign of a subtle but utterly
crucial shift in the way power was depicted and deployed. The
arrangement of the troops; their placement in relation to their
king; their movement and how it was ordered, planned, and
disciplined by a series of intersecting lines at their feet—all
these small, almost indiscernible signs were to cast a shadow over
what appears to be a straightforward, ostentatious display of Louis
XIV's famous motto, l'etat c'est moi.

From the shadows, however, Foucault suggests that something else
was taking place. A new form of power was slowly coming into focus
that Foucault would famously label disciplinary. The parade
ground drill was an operation that culminated in spectacle but
could do so only by employing a series of microlevel techniques of
discipline and drill that, in turn, produced the "spectacle
effect." This new disciplinary power would end up enveloping not
only King but also country. However, it is not the detail of that
historical transformation that is of concern here, but the
importance placed upon this metal object as an early sign of this
transition: "Let us take this medal as evidence of the moment when,
paradoxically but significantly, the most brilliant figure of
sovereign power is joined to the emergence of rituals proper to
disciplinary power" (Foucault 1979a: 189).

What Foucault (1979a) discerned from the surface of this
medallion was an inversion of visibility, producing a scene in
which the "most vile segment of the population," as Georges
Bataille (1979: 77) would label soldiery, was finally brought into
discourse in ways that were productive. No longer a discursive
absence, these "vile" elements could, with care, attention, and
discipline, serve to augment, rather than diminish, the power of
the king. While this would have immediate benefits for the
sovereign, its real significance lay elsewhere. It was an
illustration of the way government had begun to attend to
microtechniques in the management of populations. It displayed the
type of techniques government had devised to enable even the
potentially troublesome to be remolded and placed on the credit
side of the social ledger. In pointing to this future focus of
government, the medal prefigured new sets of concerns, rituals, and
practices proper to power that would move it away from courtly
considerations and toward the corporeal, producing new
understandings of the people and, as a consequence, of government.
Increasingly, a chain of understanding developed that tethered
sovereign power to discipline and, finally, to a particular
mentality of government (Foucault 1979b: 19). As it did, the rarity
of the commemorative medallion depicting ordinary soldiers
performing extraordinarily was giving ground to another form of
commemoration: the "commemoration" of the ordinary. This other,
more ubiquitous, silent, and prosaic form of commemoration was the
personnel file.

"Very good, only they breathe," remarked Grand Duke Mikhail when
viewing a military parade similar to the one for which the medal of
Louis XIV was struck (Kropotkin 1899: 12). The personnel file
constituted a means by which government could take one's breath
away while simultaneously paying even greater attention to the
disciplining of life. Indeed, in this regard, it would be no
exaggeration to suggest that the file would become the last
incarnation of this medallion. The last, perhaps, but paradoxically
not the only one. Indeed, reading Louis's famous motto of power,
l'etat c'est moi, as a foretaste of the self-legitimizing
symmetry of the "Just Do It" media slogans of today (Conley 1988:
viii), one discovers a "phantasmagoric," enchanted element to this
notion of disciplinary power. It is in revealing this that I am
drawn back to the military drill and to reimagining it in less
secular terms than Foucault's notion of discipline seems to
allow.

For soldiery, parade...

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